If you think about your experiences on the internet, you might find that some of the more deeply engaging ones haven’t always depended exclusively on the content you’re consuming.
It’s an elusive concept, that in the world of web development we refer to as metadata. Loosely described, metadata is information and insight into data and how it moves around. Metadata might be the time you visited, how many pages you went to during your visit, what country you’re from or which links brought you to each page. It doesn’t focus on the “what” and “why” so much as the “who”, “where”, “when” and “how”. As web developers, we typically focus on using metadata to return marketing information about visitors or to improve how well web sites are described for search engines.
Thinking of it this way, metadata has been very helpful for site owners and search engine optimization, but otherwise fairly boring. So how can metadata be fun for users?
For this, we can look to an upcoming game for the Nintendo 3DS called “Heroes of Ruin”.
As our work involves computers, many of us at The Web Shop enjoy electronic gaming in its various forms; PC, console or both. Recently I was looking at the Heroes of Ruin promotional web site and was right away engaged by a small achievements system they had built into their site. Despite the game not even being released yet, users are invited to create profiles. As they fill out more details about themselves and do certain things throughout the site, a notification is displayed informing them that they’ve completed another achievement.
“Aside from the natural sense of accomplishment you mean? That’s easy. Those able to successfully fill their XP bar within a limited time (starting now!) will be added to a highly exclusive area of the site called the ‘Wall of Champions’.”
By offering the option to be rewarded for getting into every corner of the site, n-space has ensured that fans are satisfied with the level of content on a site for a game before it’s release. Moreover, curious would-be fans like myself are given insight into the quality of their efforts. It’s difficult to make a lasting impression that will get visitors to commit to your message but the promise of additional content stokes their interest so that it turns into loyalty and word of mouth. This is a great example of how activity metadata can be used to prevent a web site from becoming stale and ensure that when your site becomes popular, that perception is conveyed to other visitors.
Technical creativity definitely has tangible benefits (I did just blog about it!) and I hope that we see more of this kind of dynamic engagement from web sites in the future.
Tags: data, development, meta, tags, Web
